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Page 124

These days the story teller prefers
whimsy to aching intensity, not "Wow!" but
"Ah, yes." From melodrama to mellow drama.

"Wow!" finds it difficult to contain its
"Ow!" and is always about to become "Woe" or
"Whoa!" (Who, indeed! Nearly every woe
is a who mistaken for a wow, carrying
a concealed Ow.) We think "Wow" is timeless
because it's the same forwards or backwards
(though upside down, it's, of all things, MOM),

but an old wow is not easily recaptured.
You can't pull the wow over my ice.
Or so we've been told. It's a lie.
("Mellow," too, contains "Ow".)

Whimsy is a pale echo of real play,
where, with all the fierceness of adolescence,
I can, as quick as saying "C'mere!"
(with or without rouge)
or "What's a place like this doing
in a girl like you?" or simply not saying
all the things that don't need saying -- I can
discover the New World, as, in bed,

we wrap around one another (getting
old and flabby, the better to wrap
and overlap fully and softly, at the core
a hardness all the more precious amid
the glut of softness) and WOW! WOW! WOW!
The wows come hard and fast (fast because
we hunger), no less wild for knowing
we create them, no less music
because we've learned to play the notes
perfectly.

Note: The horny "C'mere" being with or without rouge – though roguish – refers idiotically to the Khmere (C'mere") Rouge, the Cambodian so-called communists who turned Cambodia into "The Killing Fields". I suppose this suits the idea of a fierce predator and, therefore, of an ardent pick-up line. It also suggests "with or without make-up, anything to youthanize us, for the lovers here are not young. (I say "youthanize" since my silly joke about the Khmere Rouge makes me think of both death and youth in Asia. And the flab in the last stanza reminds me of my appalling pot, which leads me back to Pol Pot. I like to think that my puns condemn him to be lost for aeons in a silly hall of mirrors. (As I write these notes, my pot is not so appalling. I've been dieting and exercising and am back down to writing weight.)

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